Reasons
by Roadstergal
Summary: A gapfiller for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Mild slash.
1. Chapter 1

It was the _mercuriality _of the man that drove Guildenstern mad. The way he could prance about like a child one moment, exuberance painted like a road sign on his too-open face - then sit with his brow furrowed the next, gnawing on a knuckle and staring at the tapers, as if he saw something terribly wrong with the universe resting in the heart of the flame. Guildenstern could never resist disrupting the former with weighty matters, or disrupting the latter with a hug and reassurance. It did not give him joy, but at least he could influence the other man, if only for a moment... nothing influenced him for longer than a moment. 

"Rosencrantz..."

It might as well not have been his name, as he nibbled the end of one fingernail and stared at a strip of mortar across the room.

"Up. The boat is waiting."

"I don't like it," Rosencrantz said to the strip of mortar, quietly.

"You don't _have_ to like it. It's an order from the King, a royal directive. That is the entire point of royalty; to allow us to simply _do_, without having our own desires dragged into it. We are... to be on a boat."

"And what then?"

"To England! Weren't you listening?" Likely, he had been, but it hadn't stayed. Rosencrantz has a mind like a steel trap, Guildenstern reflected. A very large steel trap, one that could not catch anything smaller than an elephant, any of the little details of life. Invariably, the elephants were too large a meal for him to digest, so his mind would worry at it, then release it.

"Yes.. but... between here and then. We'll be on a boat."

Guildenstern sighed. "Yes, we will. Come." He hauled on Rosencrantz's shoulder, and the other man stood, changing his focus from a strip of mortar to Guildenstern, with a look of surprise on his face better suited to the former abruptly transforming into the latter.

Rosencrantz suddenly grabbed Guildenstern's shoulders. "We'll be alone. On a boat."

Guildenstern looked down awkwardly at the hands on his shoulders. "Not alone. We'll have the sailors."

"Yes."

"And Lord Hamlet."

"Yes."

Rosencrantz sighed and let go. "I don't like to be alone."

"You're never alone. We've been together since..." Guildenstern squinted and tried to think. His memory blurred somewhere around puberty, and refused to reveal origins. "Since as long as I can remember."

"Me, too."

"Which is not very far, in your case."

"No..." Rosencrantz shook his head, turned to the bed, and picked up his satchel as if it weighed far more than it did. "We have been together that long..." he turned back to Guildenstern, his face puzzled, "and we never..." he put his hand out to touch Guildenstern's cheek, looking, if possible, even more puzzled. Guildenstern shook his head. "Why not?"

"Mores, morals, conventions - the dictates of society," Guildenstern replied, with conviction.

Rosencrantz dropped his hand. "Are they important?"

"Vital."

"And England?"

"We'll just have to see when we get there. I've heard rumors."

"Ah?"

"Innuendo."

"Dramatic precedents?"

"Precisely."

For just a moment, Rosencrantz became the giggly child again. Guildenstern cast his mind about for a weighty matter to pull Rosencrantz out of it. "Can you swim?" he asked as they left the room.


	2. Excuses

It was as if nothing had changed. Well, in Rosencrantz's mind, perhaps nothing had. He sat on the hard ship's cot as if he were in the bed back in Elsinore, staring at a join of wood as if it were a strip of mortar. His hands were clasped firmly in his lap, however, and he gnawed on his lower lip instead of his knuckle. Any improvement should be welcomed, Guildenstern thought. "Up. Time to go." He picked his own satchel up off of his cot.

Rosencrantz looked up, with an expression on his face that was too much like that of a cur who had been kicked away from a scrap. "Is this all?"

Guildenstern nodded. Death was not a pleasant prospect. But they were, indeed, small men, not great movers of destiny, and this was, after all, a point of order. "Entropy is consuming the universe - did you know that? If our deaths buy some _order_, perhaps they're not so worthless after all."

"We'll never know, though," Rosencrantz sighed, casting his mournful glance on Guildenstern's satchel.

Guildenstern cocked an eyebrow. "We'll know long enough. Up until just before. Greater things than the two of us are afoot, you know." Even to himself, it sounded pompous, but he let it go. A dying man should have some latitude for hyperbole.

"That's not saying much," Rosencrantz quipped, with a wry smile.

Guildenstern sighed. "Neverthe_less_..."

Rosencrantz stood, having moved on with no provocation, as he always did, out of whatever black mood he had been under. "We are in England." His wry smile evened out, becoming genuine.

"So rumor has it."

A pleased, almost enthusiastic expression found its way to Rosencrantz's face, and settled in. "Different rules here, didn't you say?"

"You want to change our ending." Guildenstern tried to make his disapproval show in his crossed arms. It was not theirs to change.

Rosencrantz frowned. "Oh, no, no, not that. Just... add something, perhaps."

Guildenstern raised both eyebrows. "An aesthetic, moral, and logical conclusion?" The first, perhaps, but certainly not the latter two, he decided, as Rosencrantz leaned forward and pressed an awkward kiss to his cheek. Rosencrantz's beard scratched at Guildenstern's face, provoking a shiver. "We're not _that_ free," he murmured.

Rosencrantz sighed, almost petulantly. "Everything else is played out. Don't we even get this?"

"Prurient melodrama? We're no better than those... lurid prostitutes with a penchant for death we left behind."

"I've had more than enough rhetoric," Rosencrantz groused. "I want some of the love before the blood. Do you really think they all expect us to be moral all of the time?" Rosencrantz put one hand on Guildenstern's hip. "We're nothing alike. Why else would they keep confusing us?"

Guildenstern opened his mouth, but nothing came out. This was a hefty elephant that Rosencrantz had caught, and he seemed, for once, to want to hang onto it. It was too meaty for Guildenstern, however, and he gummed at it and spat it out. "What will the king say?" he asked weakly.

"He'll cut off our heads for being an hour late."

Guildenstern inclined his head. "Point."

"It'll put a spoke in their wheel."

"Unless they're expecting it."

"Then we really _should_. We're little men, after all, mustn't change the script..."

Guildenstern could think of no rebuttal, and so simply closed his eyes as lips descended onto his, and a tongue tentatively prodded its way into his mouth, flitting uncertainly around his teeth. He put his hands on Rosencrantz's hips, feeling, for no reason he could determine, absurdly self-conscious.

After a few minutes, when Rosencrantz was on his knees, fiddling with the intricately tied lacings on Guildenstern's codpiece, his tongue hanging out of one side of his mouth in intense concentration, Guildenstern did have to add, "Just - don't call out the wrong name. Please."

Rosencrantz came to his feet, a broad, guileless grin suddenly spread across his face. "Tell you what. I'll be _you_, and you..."


End file.
